• On Life and Love

    LyX

    I moved my story from MS Word to LyX (after moving from Google Docs to MS Word two nights ago after hours of flaky Internet), and my word count increased by 4%-ish. That’s worrying, because I can’t find what’s making it increase. In fact, it seems to be counting fewer things as words than Word did. LyX is rather hot. The PDF output of my story (in the “book” document class) is hot. It looks like a book. 🙂 Plus, near-plain text is sexy, and there are fewer things for me to distract myself with in LyX. Fewer buttons and animated things. If I need a distraction, though, there are…

  • On Life and Love

    Oh, dear.

    I just realized that I totally screwed myself over when my characters start interacting with my aliens in my story. I’ve made the aliens so different that writing dialogue is going to slow down my story progress to a crawl. Oi. (I just couldn’t resist the idea of aliens with a real sense of time, far beyond humans’ usual linear sense of it. Too bad that fucks up sentence tenses royally.) 4000 more words to go for this evening!

  • On Life and Love

    5000 words since waking

    Oy. If I can keep this up for eight more days, I’ll win NaNoWriMo in time for classes to resume. Lessons learned today: Having two female protagonists in a lot of scenes together results in a problem: you can’t use pronouns as freely as you would otherwise. “She watched her…” just doesn’t work very well. Growl. It’s hard to know when to leave out a scene and how to properly make sure the important information gets known to the reader later. There’s a tendency to want to write out every little scene for word count purposes, but that just slows the plot down to a crawl. Microsoft Word’s Autosummarize feature…

  • On Life and Love

    Ah, vacation.

    My evenings the past couple of days have been going a bit like this: Write for about two hours solid. Browse the NaNoWriMo forums for about 5 minutes. Glance at the Uru Live forums for 10 seconds. If I’m stuck on plot, knit a couple of rows, cursing my cheap, old Walmart yarn (that easily fucking unravels into individual strands!) and lack of skill. Go back to writing for another couple of hours. This way, I’ll complete NaNoWriMo in 8-9 days, get back into knitting quickly, and not be starved for pseudo-human contact!

  • On Life and Love

    Quote of the day.

    “Laziness, like money, doesn’t really exist except to represent something else–in this case fear, severe self-judgment, or what Natalie Goldberg calls ‘the cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure.'” –Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft Not just in writing, in my opinion.